Erica Wagner: My Brother’s Book by Maurice Sendak

Share via

It’s not an easy book; but he was not an easy man. Read once, it may mystify: but you will return to it, again and again

It is dawn in Brooklyn as I type. Outside the apartment, ships’ horns cry and
traffic bustles, just as it has for hundreds of years. These days Brooklyn
is a hip literary locale — but when Maurice Sendak was born here, in
Bensonhurst, in 1928, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, his world
was, by his own account, one of poverty and fear — as the Holocaust, and the
deaths of his extended family in that horror, shadowed his childhood.

Sendak died last year; but now a Brooklyn school, P.S. 118 in Park Slope, has
been renamed in his honour: the